The Best External Hard Drives of 2016

Grab one of these top-rated external drives and get to the important business of backing up.

July 11, 2016, 11:30 a.m.

Storage has never been cheaper. For as little as $50, you can add a terabyte to your laptop or desktop via an external drive. That's enough to house more than 750,000 MP3s or photos, or more than 230 full-length movie files. Every computer out there, from mega-huge desktop towers to budget-price Windows tablets, can connect to at least one hard drive, with no complex installation required. And if you're lucky enough to have multiple I/O ports, you can hook up many more. But which to choose? There's a lot to consider—desktop- or laptop-class, traditional spinning or solid-state drive (SSD) are only a couple of factors. Here's everything you need to consider when shopping for an external hard drive.

Hard Drive Types There are two types of external drives. Desktop-class drives, with 3.5-inch mechanisms inside, require a power adapter. They are designed to stay in one place, typically on your desk at home or at the office. If you're buying a desktop-class drive for video or lots of file transfers, look for one with a built-in fan, as the extra cooling will extend the drive's life expectancy. Notebook-class (aka pocket or portable) hard drives are usually 2.5-inch mechanisms powered through the connector cable. You can slip a 2.5-inch model into a coat and even some pants pockets.

Desktop-class models currently top out at 8 terabytes (TB) per mechanism, but some drive manufacturers put two to four mechanisms into a chassis for more storage (for example, two 4TB drives for a total of 8TB of storage). Notebook-class drives come in capacities up to 4TB, but capacities from 500GB to 2TB are most common.

A word about multiple drives: You can increase capacity, speed, or data protection by buying an external RAID array, but multiple drives add expense and (some) complexity. Once you connect a single-volume external RAID array to your PC or Mac, it will show up and act as any other external drive. After that, it can become more complex. You should consider a drive with support for RAID levels 1, 5, or 10 if you're storing really important data that you can't afford to lose. There are other RAID levels for speed and capacity, and both software and hardware RAID implementations. Read our excellent primer, RAID Levels Explained, for a more in-depth explanation.

External SSDs are found mostly in the notebook-class form factor. They're currently limited to smaller capacities, typically in the 64GB to 512GB range, though they top out at 2TB. Thunderbolt, USB 3.1/USB-C, and USB 3.0 external SSDs are available now, but they are much more expensive than spinning hard drives: For example, a simple 1TB USB 3.0 (spinning) hard drive goes for about $50 to $60, while a 1TB SSD using USB 3.0 costs upwards of $300. Want to know more about how hard drives and SSDs compare? Check out SSD vs. HDD: What's the Difference?

Input, Need Input External drives connect to PCs and Macs via their external cables. USB 2.0/3.0 ports are almost always present; others can include FireWire (400 and 800), external SATA (eSATA), or newer connectors like USB-C or Thunderbolt 3. USB 3.0 provides fast transfer speeds and a minimum of fuss, since almost all desktop and laptop PCs come with USB ports. USB-C is a newer standard, supported using the smaller USB-C connector, and is still fairly uncommon to find on drives. It has the same theoretical speed as the original Thunderbolt (10Gbps), but is governed by the same group of companies that developed the other formats of USB.

The external drives we've reviewed all have USB connectivity, a good thing since even detachable-hybrid tablets have at least one USB 2.0 port, with its theoretical 480Mbps throughput. Less common, but ostensibly speedier, is the FireWire port, in both 400Mbps and 800Mbps formats. FireWire 400 and 800 are signal-compatible (they can use the same wires), but they have different FW400 or FW800 connectors on the ends of those cables. FireWire can be daisy-chained; you can connect several drives or devices up to a single FireWire port when you connect them together first.

The next fastest interface you'll see in an external hard drive is eSATA, which is theoretically capable of 3Gbps (3,000Mbps), an order of magnitude faster than USB 2.0. While eSATA is fast, it does not provide power over the connector cable and will require either a USB cable for power, a combined USB/eSATA cable (and connector), or an external AC adapter. Drives that are eSATA compatible are on the way out now that Thunderbolt and USB have replaced eSATA in most applications. In terms of interface, USB 3.0 is even faster than eSATA, with a 5Gbps theoretical throughput. USB 3.0 has the benefit of being backward-compatible with USB 2.0 (it will connect to USB 2.0 ports, but will transfer but at the slower USB 2.0 speeds). You can find drives with multiple ports (for example, a triple interface drive with USB 2.0/3.0, FireWire 800, and eSATA), though you'll still only be able to connect a single drive to a single computer, and each additional interface adds to the drive's complexity and cost. USB-C uses smaller plugs and jacks compared with traditional USB, but it can use compatible hardware. A handful of USB memory sticks and hard drives are currently available with both USB 3.0 and USB-C support via two separate connectors. Optional adapters will let you use older USB drives with PCs with newer USB-C ports.

All About Thunderbolt One of the outlying interconnect technologies is Thunderbolt (formerly known as Light Peak), which was developed by Intel and first championed by Apple. Thunderbolt was originally designed as a speedy optical link (using fiber optics), but the practicality of adding a new connector to existing systems dictated that the shipping version works with copper cables and existing connectors. Visually (but not electrically) identical to the Mini DisplayPort connector, the Thunderbolt interface can drive both monitors and external hard drives. As with FireWire, Thunderbolt devices can be daisy-chained together to work with one connector on a laptop or desktop, and the interface can be used to boot a Mac (USB boot drives may not work on some Macs). Best of all, the Thunderbolt 2 interface has a faster theoretical throughput: up to 20GBps.

Thunderbolt is becoming a common standard in professional-grade systems from manufacturers as diverse as Apple, Dell, and HP. We see Thunderbolt as a niche player, mainly in higher-end desktop and mobile workstations, where you need to transfer a lot of data quickly. Its newest iteration is Thunderbolt 3. It uses the same connector and cables as USB-C and doubles the throughput ceiling to 40Gbps, but both the external drive and your computer must be Thunderbolt 3–compatible to get the most out of this new interface.

How Important Is Drive Speed?While a 7,200rpm drive is inherently faster than a 5,400rpm drive, the true answer would be "it depends." If you are transferring lots of files over a speedy interface like eSATA (fast), USB 3.0/USB-C (faster), or Thunderbolt (fastest), then by all means go for the 7,200rpm drive. But if you're limited to USB 2.0 or FireWire 400/800, then I would trade speed for capacity and get the largest 5,400rpm drive that your budget allows. USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 are older interfaces that work fine with a 5,400rpm drive. If all-out speed is your goal, multiple drives (7,200rpm, 10,000rpm, or SSD) over Thunderbolt 3 is the fastest (and most costly), with a single SSD connected via Thunderbolt 1/2 or USB 3.0/3.1 as next fastest, and so on.

Finally, there are some other differentiators to consider. Color and design: You can buy different colored drives for each family member, for example. Included software is a factor if you don't already have a backup plan. If you're simply using the drive as an extra storage container, or if you're using the backup software built into Windows or Mac OS, the software bundled with the drive isn't as important. Warranty is also a big factor in our ratings: Drives can and will fail on you. That cheap drive you found on a deal site may only come with a one-year warranty. Look for a three- or five-year warranty if you're hard on your drives.

FEATURED IN THIS ROUNDUP

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The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive (5TB) is incredibly spacious, reasonably fast, and since it has a class-leading 5 terabytes of storage, it costs only pennies per gigabyte. Read the full review ››

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The Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive gives you 4 terabytes of speedy storage you can take with you, as well as a personal cloud, all for a very reasonable price. Read the full review ››

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The 1-terabyte Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC has a built-in cable you can't lose, a rugged chassis that will survive a rough daily commute, and an NFC card and reader add some security to this portable hard drive. Read the full review ››

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With its protective rubber bumpers and speedy 4 terabytes of storage, the LaCie Rugged RAID has what it takes to handle the rigors of your travels or even just your daily life. Read the full review ››

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The 6TB Promise Pegasus2 R2+ is a versatile external drive for Thunderbolt 2-equipped Macs and PCs. It uses a two-drive RAID array for speed and capacity, but it can be supplemented with removable hard-drive pods or its included media card reader. Read the full review ››

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The pricey Samsung Portable SSD T3 is one of the fastest portable drives we've tested. It's an ideal choice if you need lots of speedy storage in a box about the size of a deck of cards. Read the full review ››

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The 2-terabyte Transcend Storejet 300 for Mac has both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 interfaces, which can be convenient if all of your USB ports are occupied. But you'll pay for that flexibility. Read the full review ››